Ten Reasons to Love Delhi

A couple walked on the road leading upto India’s Presiden’ts Palace in New Delhi.

Delhi, the capital of the world’s largest democracy, has come under a lot of flak in the past year.

The fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in the city earned it the “unsafe” tag internationally. The city is full of obstacles that make living here challenging. Just getting around is tough. Forget the gummed up roads, even walking in Delhi can be really difficult. Its flagship airport, which handles more than 34 million passengers annually and is only three years old, is prone to flooding when there’s too much rain.

But there are rays of light in the city, which on a closer look, reveal a certain charm. As the capital goes to the polls today, we take a look at 10 things about Delhi that remind us of the brighter side.

1. Springtime

When spring is sprung, Delhi becomes a city of flowering trees and fragrant breezes.

This blissful state lasts approximately four days. As the great Mughal poet Ghalib wrote, “Where there is no autumn, how can spring exist?”

Delhi ensures the appreciation of springtime by filling the remaining 361 days with other memorable and more prolonged seasons: psychotic heat, road-choking rain, and smog.

2. Free therapy

Delhi life is one big therapy session. Just let it all out.

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Commuters waited to board the Delhi Metro.

Opportunities to release repressed anger particularly present themselves when one is in transit. You can scream, shout and weep—‘Rascal, you are! Whither justice?’—all before you even get into an auto rickshaw.

Delhi-ites also take advantage of the city’s Metro to work out their anger management issues. Practice your jiu-jitsu, especially for the women’s queues.

3. Flexibility and honesty

Actually, everyday Delhi existence is pretty liberating.

Running late? Relax, we’re on Indian Stretchable Time—all the fun people will arrive at least two hours late anyway.

There’s a lady opposite? Stare at her. She has a moustache? She’ll appreciate your frankness if you loudly recommend a good strimmer.

4. Perpetual novelty

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The Qutub Minar complex in New Delhi.

Delhi’s history is extraordinary and its monuments are glorious, from the Qutub Minar, a 12-century minaret, and Jama Masjid, one of India’s largest mosques, to the hundreds of smaller relics dotted around the city that risk extinction. But the capital has also been constantly rebuilt, relocated, recycled, and colored by waves of migration.

The result is endless novelty.

Bored of your local shops? Don’t worry, they’ll be totally different in a week. Had enough of your semi-legal house? No problem—a major sporting event is coming up, so it’ll be torn down next Tuesday. Unless you’re middle-class, that is.

In response Delhi has transformed into a shopper’s delight. Today, visitors will find an artistic and fashion-conscious capital, filled with American brands and Chinese restaurants— there’s even an indigenous breed of hipsters and plenty of Indian pride.

7. The power

Delhi owes its prestige to the fact that it is the heart of the world’s largest democracy. Alas, the government has struggled in recent months. Officials are all busy ‘kindly doing the needful’ and the capitals VVIPs (very very important people) spend time roaming wild in Lodhi Gardens, in training for their frequent parliamentary walkouts.

8. The food

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A street food vendor prepares in Delhi.

A gastronomic paradise, Delhi’s shrines are its golgappas stands selling hollow pastry balls filled with a potato mixture and tamarind water, and its avenues lined with kebab stalls.

On one end of the spectrum are glitzy five-star hotel restaurants. Conscious of India’s science-loving reputation, they provide arithmetic practice through an elaborate system of taxes, service charges, and booze levies, including a levy for air-conditioning.

On the other end is, of course, Shahjahanabad, better known as Old Delhi. Until the British came, this was Delhi at her luscious prime. As one of her suitors, the seventeenth-century intellectual Chandra Bhan Brahman, enthused: “Her avenues are so full of pleasure that her lanes are like the roads of paradise.” From aloo tikki to pav bhaji, it’s worth even the threat of Delhi Belly.

Consider: what other cities have the honour of having an entire ailment named after them? Nobody talks about, say, the Rangoon Rumbles or the St. Moritz Squits.

9. The frisson of danger

Life is never less than exciting in Delhi. It is periodically shaken by earthquakes, dengue and dust storms, and invaded by savage monkeys. Every car journey is a game of chicken. Aunties pack pistols in case they should suffer an outbreak of road rage. This is a city, lest we forget, which in which in 2001 witnessed mass panic over alleged attacks by a murderous cyborg “monkey-man.”

Once my friend found a tooth embedded in the auto seat next to her. A humantooth. I rest my case.

10. The people

Delhi is India’s brash, restless, gossipy melting pot. There are a thousand different species of the ‘Dilliwalla,’ well beyond the obvious stereotypes, and it is of course them who really make the city worth living in. Even the ones who wear sunglasses indoors.

Elizabeth Chatterjee is the author of “Delhi Mostly Harmless,” published by Random House India on Dec. 9. Born and raised in Yorkshire, U.K., Ms. Chatterjee and currently divides her time between Delhi and Oxford.

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